POLICY PERSPECTIVE Impact of Local Empowerment on Conservation Practices in a Highly Developed Country Sigrid Engen & Vera Helene Hausner Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway Keywords Abstract Before and after; community-based conservation; governance; IUCN; land tenure; Community-based conservation, where local decision makers are responsible Norway; protected areas. for balancing conservation and development, is often preferred to exclusion- ary conservation that prioritizes use-limitation through strict regulation. Un- Correspondence raveling the evidence for conservation impact of different governance regimes Sigrid Engen, UiT The Arctic University of is challenging. Focusing on conservation practices before and after a reform Norway, Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries and can provide an early indication of behavioral changes acting as a precursor to Economics, PB 6050 Langnes, 9037 Tromsø, Norway. Tel: +47-776-44441. E-mail: changes in social and ecological outcomes, which generally need more time to [email protected] materialize. A recent reform in Norway provides a unique opportunity to eval- uate the impact of local empowerment on conservation practices in protected Received areas. We analyzed 1,466 decisions in 31 protected areas before and after the 17 February 2017 reform while accounting for differences between private and public property Accepted ownership. We found that the conservation practices were liberal both before 18 April 2017 and after the reform. The impact of local empowerment on conservation prac- Editor tices was contingent on land tenure: more use was allowed after the reform on Erin Sills private land. We conclude that conservation impact evaluations could benefit from a before-and-after spatial approach taking into account land tenure for doi: 10.1111/conl.12369 analyzing the impacts of local decision making. Introduction both ecological and social benefits through better use of local knowledge in policy implementation (Ribot 2002; The conservation impact of protected areas depends on Van Laerhoven 2010; Brooks et al. 2013). their governance, but the effect of different governance The term community-based conservation represents regimes on conservation remains uncertain (Macura et al. various forms of local involvement depending on the so- 2015). Exclusionary conservation where power is held ciopolitical context. It includes cases where: (1) the gov- with national authorities and enforced through strict le- ernment grants decision making to local governing bod- gal regulations is, on the one hand, thought to favor ies, (2) the local communities own or have usage rights conservation through use-limitation (Bruner et al. 2001; in the conserved area due to collective land tenures, and Locke & Dearden 2005), but too strict or poorly devised (3) the “local residents exercise de facto control in the ab- rules that fail to account for social impacts can reduce lo- sence of formal rights” (Poteete & Ostrom 2004; Hausner cal support and rule compliance over time (Agrawal & et al. 2012). Community-based conservation could fur- Chhatre 2007; Chan et al. 2012). Community-based con- ther be understood as a bottom-up process where deci- servation attempts to address these challenges by com- sion making starts at the local level and involves inter- bining local development with conservation, including actions at multiple levels (Berkes 2006; Baral 2012). This stakeholders as active participants and/or devolve con- perspective reflects the fact that local decision making is trol over natural resources (Robinson & Redford 2004; constrained by conservation policies and rules originally Brooks et al. 2013). Local involvement is expected to gain crafted at higher levels of governance and depends on fi- support for conservation, foster stewardship, and provide nancial support from external sources. Conservation Letters, April 2017, 00(00), 1–8 Copyright and Photocopying: C 2017 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Impact of local empowerment on conservation S. Engen & V.H. Hausner Figure 1 Conservation objectives of Norwegian protected areas. The purpose of Norwegian protected areas is to safeguard areas of vulnerable and threatened nature, cultural heritage and cultural landscapes, and give the public the opportunity to experience nature through simple recreation. Here, illustrated by pictures of wild reindeer, recreation, and livestock grazing. Photos top, middle-right, and bottom by Morten Kielland and middle-left by Jørn Eriksson. Other institutions, such as land tenure, add to the above suggests that land tenure could be an important complexity of protected area governance (Ostrom 2007). factor affecting the impact of protected area governance. Land tenure comes with a different set of values than A recent reform toward community-based conserva- conservation—values that are tied to the control of, ac- tion of Norwegian protected areas provides a unique case cess to, and extraction of resources (Berge 2006), rather for studying the impact of governance using a before- than to the preservation of natural values for the general and-after spatial design. Establishing protected areas in public associated with conservation (Figure 1). Society Norway has resulted in local resistance because resi- has generally been organized around these institutions dents feel their rights to use, access and decide are, or for a much longer period than protected areas, provid- will be, limited by national authorities. To reduce local ing them with a high degree of local legitimacy. Protected conflicts and improve integration between conservation areas in Norway are designated on both private and pub- and development the government decided, in 2009, to lic land, including land managed as commons, and a re- transfer decision-making authority to local protected area cent study has found that land tenure is more important boards composed mostly of elected local representatives. compared with protected areas in determining how local The reform distributed the main responsibility for pro- residents value the landscape (Hausner et al. 2015). The tected areas over a larger number of decision-making 2 Conservation Letters, April 2017, 00(00), 1–8 Copyright and Photocopying: C 2017 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. S. Engen & V.H. Hausner Impact of local empowerment on conservation Figure 2 Protected area governance in Norway before and after the reform. (A) The location of the protected areas included in our study. (B) Before reform: the regional government responsible for the protected areas in each county are marked in gray and labeled. (C & D) After reform: local protected area boards manage clusters of protected areas, which are encircled. Protected area designations (IUCN categories) are shown in different shades of green. The proportion of public and private land managed by each protected area board is shown as pie charts. bodies operating at a local scale (Figure 2). The reform incompatible with conservation objectives can be ap- is too recent to evaluate the impact of local empower- pealed or simply overturned by national authorities. ment on ecological or social outcomes, but it is possible to Stakeholders can also appeal permit decisions if they isolate the effect of governance on behavioral outcomes, disagree, reflecting their degree of acceptance of the such as the decisions made by local protected area boards decisions. regarding the use of protected areas. By investigating con- We ask: servation practice before and after the reform, the effect of local empowerment can be evaluated at an early stage. (1) Has local empowerment led to a more liberal conser- Our main research question relates to whether conser- vation practice (i.e., are more permits granted)? vation practices of decision makers have changed because (2) Has local empowerment led to an increased accep- of local empowerment. To answer this question we an- tance of conservation decisions? alyzed conservation decisions associated with permits. (3) Is the impact of local empowerment contingent on Permits are the main tool for regulating activity in Nor- land tenure or protected area designations? wegian protected areas and the most immediate way that Before-and-after spatial design and analysis local boards can influence the level of use. Each protected area has a set of rules (protection regulations) tailored Before-after studies are vulnerable to influences from to the local conditions which stipulates the activities that confounding factors, which could be causing the observed are prohibited, restricted, allowed, or require permits difference apart from the intervention (i.e., local decision (Hausner et al. 2017). By investigating permits, we can making; Ferraro 2009). Adding control sites, such as pro- assess which activities are deemed most threatening to tected areas that match the characteristics of our study conservation and how strictly the protected areas are pro- sites but where centralized governance has continued, is tected. Ultimately, permit decisions reflect interactions difficult because the reform has been extensive and in- between the different levels of governance, because cludes most national parks (34 out of 37). Using a spatial decisions